Few investigations can have begun with lower expectations than the Chilcot inquiry into Britain's involvement in the Iraq war.

Critics have been withering:

-- the Chairman Sir John Chilcot, a former Whitehall mandarin, has strong links to the establishment and is unlikely to rock the boat, they say.

-- there are no senior legal figures on the panel capable of addressing the key issue of whether the invasion of Iraq was legal. None of the panel members has spoken out against the war.

-- there is no political pressure for a radical result because the Tories voted for the invasion and the last thing they want is to let the inquiry rock the boat ahead of their expected general election victory in the Summer.

-- the scope of the inquiry is too broad, possibly leading to insufficient detailed inquiries into complex issues.

But Chilcot has denied that his report will be a whitewash, there is clearly a widespread public desire to have all the lingering questions answered and the government has granted immunity from disciplinary action to serving officials and military personnel giving evidence to encourage them to give frank evidence.

Do you expect to learn anything new from the inquiry?

Fight them there or fight them here?

Former Foreign Office minister Kim Howells poses the question in the Guardian in a piece made grimly relevant by Wednesday's shooting dead of  five British soldiers by an Afghan policeman.

Howells says troops should be brought back from Afghanistan and that the billions of pounds saved should be used to beef up homeland security in Britain -- drawing the front line against al Qaeda around the UK rather than thousands of miles away in Helmand province.

He accepts that such an approach would result in "more intrusive surveillance in certain communities," a tacit acknowledgment that Britain's Muslims would be subject to greater scrutiny by police and intelligence services.

His "Fortress Britain" theory takes into account indications that a growing number of experts feel the war against the Al Qaeda's supporters the Taliban in Afghanistan is unwinnable.

It also makes the point that not all Al Qaeda training camps are in Afghanistan anyway.

Howells is Gordon Brown's intelligence and security watchdog and his theory goes counter to the prevailing wisdom in Washington and London, both of which are preparing to send more troops to Afghanistan.

Do you agree with him?

Prince Charles is in Canada, the Queen is expected to go there next year and William is preparing to go to New Zealand and Australia -- but are there signs that the locals are revolting?

Polls published in advance of Charles' visit show support for Canada's constitutional monarchy is weak, even if the public's frosty opinion of the Prince of Wales himself has begun to warm just a bit.

Sixty percent of Canadians felt the constitutional monarchy was outdated, although 80 percent said it was an important part of Canadian history.

Polls in New Zealand show people generally in favour of the monarchy even if it seems to have little relevance to their lives but when William heads off afterwards to Australia he will find a much more developed republican movement.

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd is an avowed republican whose announcement of William's trip made it crystal clear that the young royal was coming because because he asked to, not because he was invited. Foreign Minister Stephen Smith says a split from the monarchy is inevitable in the next decade.

William, travelling without girlfriend Kate Middleton, can expect to bask in the lingering "Diana factor," but this enduring phenomenon may actually work against the older couple in Canada.

Do you believe such royal visits have any point?

Once he was regarded as an obvious front-runner for the job of EU president, then it was pointed out that it was unlikely anyone would be chosen from a country that is not in the eurozone, not in the Schengen border-free area and which has an exemption to the bloc's charter of fundamental rights.

Ah, but if you don't choose someone with proven political clout to fight Europe's corner, a G2 of China and the United States will have things all their own way soon, declared Foreign Secretary David Miliband over the weekend.

You need someone with a high profile who will stop the traffic in world capitals, he added.

Oh no, we don't, several EU countries say. We want someone with a lower profile who will be better able to secure consensus among members states than Tony Blair.

Other detrators say they don't want Blair because he backed the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. The Conservatives in Britain have said that appointing him would be viewed by an incoming Tory government as a virtual act of war and that he runs the risk of being almost immediately thrust into controversy as the Chilcot inquiry into the Iraq war begins.

The actual decision is likely to be made at a summit next month. Meanwhile Blair himself seems to be standing on the sidelines, so much so that some of his supporters are urging him to launch a more dynamic campaign.

Do you believe Blair's the man for the job?

Babies' arrivals in the world would be more straightforward if women were left alone with only a midwife to help them, as they used to be, French obstetrician Michel Odent will tell the Royal College of Midwives' annual conference in Manchester next month.

"The ideal birth environment involves no men in general," he told the Observer over the weekend.

"Having been involved for more than 50 years in childbirths in homes and hospitals in France, England and Africa, the best environment I know for an easy birth is when there is nobody around the woman in labour apart from a silent, low-profile and experienced midwife -- and no doctor and no husband, nobody else," he said.

"In this situation, more often than not, the birth is easier and faster than when there are other people around, especially male figures - husbands and doctors."

Do you agree?

The largest review of primary schooling in England for 40 years has said children at five are too young to start formal education and that six would be a more suitable age.

The Cambridge University study says play-based learning should go on for another year. Making children start school so young was a throwback to the Victorian age when the factories wanted them to start early so they could finish early and get working on the production line sooner.

Only Wales, Scotland and the Netherlands start children off at school so early, it noted. Schooling starts at the age of six in 20 out of 34 European countries, with eight nations, including Sweden, waiting until children are seven.

The government disagrees.  "A school starting age of six would be completely counter-productive," says Schools Minister Vernon Coaker. "We want to make sure children are playing and learning from an early age and to give parents the choice for their child to start in the September following their fourth birthday. "

What do you think? Is five too young?

Fury, resentment and a general feeling of being hard done-by is reported to be the prevailing mood amongst MPs as they reconvene after the Summer break to find brown envelopes of an unwelcome sort waiting for them.

These are the already infamous "Legg letters," the latest symbol along with duck houses, moats and mole-catchers of the expenses scandal which did so much damage to all parties earlier this year.

Written as a result of the inquiry headed by former civil servant Sir Thomas Legg, they assess the expenses claimed by each MP between 2004 and 2008 and, where anomalies have been found, they either demand repayment or clarification.

Gordon Brown is to pay back 12,415 pounds, Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg 910 pounds and SNP leader Alex Salmond 700 pounds. David Cameron has been asked to provide more details about his mortgage repayments.

But three things have particularly annoyed backbenchers.

The first is that Legg has imposed  retrospective limits on various categories of expenses that the MPs themselves obviously cannot have known about at the time. He has said the maximum allowable for cleaning for example is 2,000 pounds and that for gardening 1,000 pounds, according to newspaper reports.

The second is the perception at Westminster that those MPs who made the really big claims, the ones on mortgage payments, are getting away with it. Saying "sorry" seems to be enough, as in the case of former Home Secretary Jacqui Smith.

And the third is that some MPs feel they have been unfairly singled out for reprisal by party leaders eager to be seen to be taking action.

Do you think they have a point? Is it time to stop harassing MPs and get on with government?

As the public spending axe starts swinging, attention inevitably turns northwards to the chilly waters of the Clyde where Britain's nuclear deterrent is based.

The four Vanguard class submarines which make up what is left of the UK deterrent come to the end of their lives around 2019 and their Trident missiles will need updating in the 2020s.

The go-ahead for replacement, which will cost some 20 billion pounds, was given by Tony Blair in 2006.

Cheaper alternatives, like having a ballistic missile system or a plane-delivered bomb or cutting the number of subs to three have been mulled over the last few years.

Some people would like to scrap the deterrent altogether, arguing it was never necessary in the first place and that the nature of threats to Britain has changed radically since the Cold War.

Others believe a minimum level of deterrence is vital given the proliferation of nuclear weapons into the Middle East and Asian regions.

What do you think? Is the need to balance our books so great as to end the 52-year British independent deterrent?

The death toll among British troops in Afghanistan is rising fast.  The soldier who died on Tuesday was the seventh to die in the last week and the 176th since the war began.

Last Wednesday, Lieutenant Colonel Rupert Thorneloe became the highest ranking British soldier to die in the conflict in Afghanistan when he was killed in Helmand. British commanders are quoted as saying things are going to get worse before they get better.

Not surprisingly, doubts are being raised about the price being paid in Afghanistan, about the nature of the mission itself and whether security can ever be made effective enough to rebuild the country after 30 years of war.

Defence Secretary Bob Ainsworth concedes there is gloom about the rising death toll but rejects comparisons with the Vietnam war that lasted over 15 years and says there is a "real sense of momentum" in Afghanistan.

Do you believe Britain should stay in Afghanistan?

The shockwaves reverberating through Westminster as the MPs' expenses scandal unfolds have been compared with the "Clean Hands" bribery scandal that effectively demolished Italy's post-war political establishment in the space of a couple of years in the early 1990s.

If things are going to get that bad, the guilty politicians are going to have an uncomfortable time.

As a reporter in Rome at the time, I remember how surprise turned to anger then just as it has now as the public began to realise the sheer extent of the corruption that was helping to line the pockets of the country's leading politicians and their parties.

The morning newspapers brought fresh revelations almost daily of how the main political parties routinely demanded kickbacks in return for government contracts. There were the "golden sheets" for example in which invoices for linen and bedding were inflated to thousands of pounds, and the exorbitant demands placed on suppliers to hospitals, which caused particular anger.

People used to demonstrate in the streets wearing white gloves to show they had clean hands. They would try to scare MPs they felt were corrupt by sending them spoof versions of the "avviso," the official notice that warned potential offenders they were under investigation. The avviso itself became one of the enduring symbols of the scandal, almost like the guillotine in revolutionary France. Reproductions of it used to sell well as birthday and Christmas cards.

Another favourite amng the angry public, if any disgraced politician dared show his face his public, was to mockingly shower them with coins.

Such was the fate of one of those held to have been most deeply involved in the corruption, Socialist leader Bettino Craxi, who was forced to flee to his second home in Tunisia to escape jail in Italy. Other disgraced politicians and businessmen even took their own lives.

What was going on in Italy at that time was undoubtedly far more serious than the exploitation of MPs' expenses, but because the British have tended to be less cynical about their elected representatives, the sense of outrage has been much the same.

But before the calls for a complete shake-out of the British political establishment become so loud as to be unstoppable, it might be worth remembering, as former Labour minister Michael Meacher points out in his blog, that political vaccuums often produce surprise results.

Fringe parties, for example, can make big gains, as seems to be happening already in Britain.

And in the case of Italy, the net result of the collapse of its main parties was -- Silvio Berlusconi.